Friday, May 6, 2016

Still A Mess - Off the Wall Friday

Lately, my favorite saying is taken from my teen, Tessa, "I'm a mess!" But actually this week, it seems like things are getting back on track in my life. Well, almost all things. Not my flower piece, now . . . it's a mess. I've redone it at least three times....THREE times! The flowers more than that! I worked on it
today and nothing was going right. That's when it dawned on me. I was doing art and working with fabric for fun.

And this was not fun.

Still the news is not all bad. I did come up with a way to do the flowers. As you remember, I've been playing with the ideas of either making blotches of color that give the impression of flowers or to fussy cut flowers in a broderie perse style. I decided to take, the advice of Audree Faubert, "I think a little of both would be great." So what I did was cut them out quickly and started grouping them together in batches. I made to sure to vary scale and value just like flowers do in real life and they looked great. . .all pinned to my design wall. Sewing them down and keeping them in that arrangement didn't look like it was going to be easy.
Then the a light bulb went off in my head and I grabbed my Steam-a-Seam 2 Lite. I used the sheets to arrange the flowers on just the way I wanted them (its sticky on one side), then fused them down lightly together. This created a mass applique which could be stuck ( the other side is sticky too!) to my piece. Ta-da - problem solved!!

The fact still remains that the piece was a mess! As my husband states in a photo, it doesn't look all that bad but in person it reads flat. VERY flat. Now normally, I would just trash the piece, but its due for next week and its - well - A MESS. sighhhhhhhh

That's when the light bulb went off for the second time. There are parts that are working and parts that aren't. So I'm going to trash the parts that aren't and rework the parts that are. All by next week. Maybe. Hopefully.

I'm in the same blog hop on the same day as you and can understand you frustration. I hate deadlines so started a month and a half ago and lucked out by having things go right but that doesn't always happen. What if you choose something simple, in your comfort zone that you know you can finish in a couple days. You are starting to hate this one so it needs to be put in the corner (time out) Including it your post with what went wrong would be good for the readers though. We like to see that others have quilts that don't always work so we know e are not alone :-)

I found that the pieces that I was angry at for being so difficult, became some of my strongest work. I feel your agony and I'm confident you will pull out a strong piece. I joined the SAQA critique group and it has been very useful-just a thought. Forgot if you were SAQA or not.

Nina, have you thought about piecing the flowers as in the old water color quilts? Also if you do the appliqué you might need some areas of green or Browns or neutrals here and there to break up the flowers.

Hi Nina-Marie, hang in there! I'm sure that it will work out (maybe not as perfect as we might want, but it will come to you! The problem with intuition and creativity is that it doesn't always (mostly never) allows for deadlines. I finished my art quilt the day it was due - but not without a lot of stress! Looking forward to seeing your finished art work :-)

I am sure whatever you share next week it is going to be beautiful and inspirational! Struggles are part of being an artist and it is the part that is rarely shared in art galleries :) so enjoy the learning experience and have fun! :)